The Mortal Instruments

There is a world laid over your own like a second skin, and you have been trained since birth not to see it. In it walk the Nephilim — Shadowhunters, born of angel blood, who burn protective runes into their flesh and hunt the demons that slip through the cracks between worlds. Around them move the Downworlders: vampires, werewolves, faeries, and the long-lived warlocks who remember everything. This is the Shadowhunter Chronicles, and once you have seen the marks on their arms you cannot unsee them. The chronicle spans centuries and cities, always the same secret order under different skies. The contemporary heart is The Mortal Instruments, six novels beginning in a Brooklyn where a girl named Clary discovers what she truly is. Backward reach The Infernal Devices (Victorian London) and The Last Hours (its Edwardian children); forward and westward, The Dark Artifices carries the blade to Los Angeles. Threaded between them are Magnus Bane's story in The Eldest Curses and the braided short-fiction collections — Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy, Ghosts of the Shadow Market — that Cassandra Clare wrote alongside Sarah Rees Brennan, Maureen Johnson, Robin Wasserman, and Kelly Link. One architect, many hands, a single Law. What marks these books is the collision of the sacred and the swooning: angelic warfare fought by teenagers whose truest peril is the heart. Forbidden love, found family, the cold arithmetic of the Clave weighed against loyalty — all of it lit with glamour, gallows wit, and a great deal of glitter wherever Magnus stands. Newcomers should begin where the world did, with City of Bones, and let The Mortal Instruments run its full six volumes; readers who prefer their romance in crinoline can instead open Clockwork Angel and come to the modern age already knowing how old these griefs are.